The rain soaking the Irish landscape in Niall Williams's (Four Letters of Love) luminous novel History of the Rain is as dark and unremitting as Ireland's poetry and storytelling are its miracles.
Ruth Swain is confined to her attic bedroom after collapsing from an unexplained illness while at college. Here she receives visitors like the adoring Nick Cunningham and her old teacher Mrs. Quinty. Here Ruth reads from her father's collection of nearly 4,000 books, to understand her world and find her father. Here, in the face of her own possible mortality, she writes his story to keep him.
Ruth is ironic, self-aware and very funny. She is a contemporary woman wrapped up in Ireland's history and literature. She's a nonbeliever in a deeply Catholic parish. Like Emily Dickinson, she has the habit of capitalization (an Eccentric Superabundance of Style). Ruth's voice is wonderful, bursting with wry observations, but it also aches with love and loss. There's her father; her golden twin brother, Aeney; her illness; and her inability to stop herself from pushing away the devoted Nick. The language is gorgeous and surprising. If there is writerly excess here, Williams has accomplished the neat trick of making it Ruth's excess while leaving the reader to marvel.
In the novel's only false notes, Ruth's mother doesn't quite come into clear focus and Ruth's illness doesn't seem to rise above metaphor. Overall, however, History of the Rain is charming, wise and beautiful. It is a love letter to Ireland in all its contradictions, to literature and poetry and family. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer